David Currie

Another SOC website related posting – this time on the subject of backup. The website is backed up by the club’s current hosting provider (Krystal – who, a year in, I can highly recommend) but I was informed that the club had bought a large quantity of cloud storage for the purpose of storing its map archive and, for belt and braces, it made sense to also include backups of the website there.

As it turned out, the cloud storage was courtesy of pCloud who are best described as a Dropbox clone i.e. the expected interaction patterns are via the web UI, mobile, or sync from the desktop app. A quick search turned up rclone which describes itself as “rsync for cloud storage” and, amongst the list of supported backends, includes pCloud.

Install on hosting provider was straightforward. The configuration process is interactive (opening a browser to log in to pCloud) but the docs also cover how to create the configuration on one machine and copy them across to another. A copy is then as simple as:

I started out looking to use drush arb to create a backup but, as the same hosting is used for a WordPress site, it was easiest in the end just to write a script using tar and mysqldump to create the archive of the file system and database tables. This is then triggered nightly on a cron job. Each backup is around 0.5GB so I wasn’t too concerned about incremental backup and, with 2 TB of storage to play with, it will be a while before the question of cleaning up old backups comes back to haunt me!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 30th, 2019 at 7:56 pm and is filed under Hosting, Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.